The world is full of people who know what’s right for you and me. I don’t know how they do it. I find it very hard to decide what’s right for me, myself. I’m confused all the time. And yet, there are these people who know what’s right for every one of you. I don’t know how they do it.
Do you know that juries have the right to nullify the law? Very few people know that. Actually, that was what the Magna Carta was all about. The barons did not drag King John to Runnymede and put him on starvation rations and hold him prisoner, and force him to sign that document just so that juries could ratify what the government has decided to do. The whole idea of Magna Carta was that juries could make up their own mind what laws they were willing to have imposed upon the English population. And this has been upheld repeatedly, as in the trial of William Penn in 1690, where William Penn was technically guilty of speaking in public. That was against the law at that time—if you had unpopular religious opinions, you couldn’t speak in public. The jury refused to convict him, and the judge ordered the jury locked up until they would convict him. And the jury kept coming, being brought back to court every day from the Tower of London where they were locked up, and they said, “We still find the defendant innocent,” until it became the biggest controversy in London, and finally the judge admitted the jury did have that right. The United States Supreme Court upheld that right, too, in the 1890s in a celebrated case. They ruled that the jury has the right to nullify the law; that the purpose of the jury system is that twelve people, selected at random, can speak for the whole community about what laws they want imposed on them. The Supreme Court also ruled that the judge doesn’t have to tell that to the jury.